Using the Western tradition of metaphysical and political thought as a backdrop, Critique of Sovereignty (a work in 4 volumes) re-examines the concept of sovereignty in order to better understand why our ethical values and technical capacities often seem so divorced from our lived realities. On the one hand, ostensibly self-enclosed entities like the nation-state and the person are rhetorically bolstered as sites of technical agency and/or moral responsibility. On the other hand, these same entities appear fragile -- if not (...) purely fictional -- in relation to ever ongoing tidal processes such as the migration, diffusion, and conglomeration of bodies, capital, ideas, etc. While some of our institutions might work some of the time, they always seem to work differently than we like to think they do. Accordingly, the forging of more humane institutions might very well entail if not require ways of thinking that strive to undo the self-imagined binds, exceptions, and sureties of thought for the sake of embracing a continuity with all that withers, decays, and falls away. Book I, "Contemporary Theories of Sovereignty," compares the varied interpretations of sovereignty given by a range of 20th-century political theorists (Maritain, Foucault, Derrida, Schmitt, Agamben, Hardt, and Negri) with Jean Bodin's initial outline of the concept, rendered at the outset of modern political thought in the 16th century. The analytic framework of sovereignty encountered in these comparative readings provides an initial point of departure for unfolding a method of critique appropriate to the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty is an ideal starting point for a critique of the deadlocks between thought and reality for a simple reason: it doesn't actually exist. When it serves as a guide to action, sovereignty may be regarded as a particularly captivating fantasy. The closer it appears, the further it recedes, and, too often, the more vigorously it is pursued. (shrink)

Whether Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of morality is best understood as an internal or as an external critique remains a matter of controversy. On the internalist interpretation (Ridley, Owen, Merrick ), the genealogical enterprise takes as its starting point the perspective being criticized, gradually revealing it to be untenable ‘from within.’ On the externalist interpretation (Leiter, and arguably Geuss, Williams, and Janaway ), this constraint is lifted; the starting point of the critique need not be the perspective being criticized, but may (...) be that of someone who already suspects the latter to be untenable. According to a common objection to ‘external critique’ interpretations, the limited-scope objection, since an external critique to a value-system could only work on an audience whose members were predisposed to abandon that system of values, ‘external critique’ interpretations impose a severe limitation on the transformative potential of Nietzsche’s project. ‘Internal critique’ interpretations, by contrast, can seem hard to reconcile with the polemical character of On the Genealogy of Morality (which lends the book its subtitle, Eine Streitschrift) and with Nietzsche’s frequent remarks to the effect his works were addressing a particular, ‘higher,’ kind of individual. -/- The overarching goal in this paper is to call into question the usefulness of the ‘internal-external’ or ‘immanent-transcendent’ dichotomy for understanding Nietzsche’s genealogical critique. I argue that the apparent usefulness of the distinction between external and internal critiques when approaching Nietzsche’s works rests on the assumption that any critique of values must itself be grounded on values that function as evaluative-critical standards. If the assumption is right, then one of two things, either the values that are deployed as standards coincide with those that are the target of critique, in which case the critique is internal, or they are not (etc.). Thus the assumption is liable to render us forgetful of a third possibility, that of a critical strategy that does not work by deploying (internal or external) values as standards of critical assessment, but by revealing something about the nature of value, and more precisely about the origin of any individual’s commitments to their values. -/- On the view that I defend, one of the crucial steps of Nietzsche’s genealogical method is to bring his reader to realize that any individual’s commitment to their values is expressive of and rooted in their commitment to preserve their way of life. Realizing this does not require that the reader abandon their own values. But it does require that they acknowledge that were they committed to a relevantly different way of life, they would subscribe to different values. And this, in turn, suffices to bring about a transformation in their understanding of and relationship to those commitments through the further realization that it is ultimately always up to them to undertake the project of taking distance from and ‘re-evaluating’ those values. (shrink)

Modern formal logic, which is based on Kant’s logical project, interprets logical consequence as formal, which leads to substantive paradoxes that combine any thoughts at all and so to the loss of consequence as such. Beginning with A. Tarski, modern history of logic brings the problem of logical consequence into the realmof search for the relation of consequence, or grounding. In his doctoral dissertation on the nature of logical formality J. MacFarlane claims that the paradoxes of formal theories of logical (...) consequence stem from the loss of grounding by the transcendental system of logic in the post­Kantian logical tradition. Arguably, analysis of logical terminology of consequence in Kant’s seminal works — Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of the Power of Judgment — in comparison with the terminology of earlier works, Prolegomena and lectures on logic attributed to him will clarify the question of the relation oflogical consequence in the formal and non­formal sense. The key concept of consequence in Kant’s terminology is Folgerung, which denotes ‘following’ in logical and non­logical contexts. I have also analysed related concepts: Folge, Abfolge, folglich etc., established dif- ferences between logical terms with similar meaning ‘inference’ (Schluss) and ‘conclusion’ (Konklusion). Finally, I make an attempt to formulate the problem of logical consequence in formal logic through the logical terms Schlussfolge, Folgerung and Konsequenz. On the strength of my analysis I propose to consider Kant’s consequence (Folgerung) to be a concept of transcendental logic that reflects the relation of consequence and grounds formal consequence. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an anti-Humean critique to Williamson and Russo’s approach to medical mechanisms. I focus on one of the specific claims made by Williamson and Russo, namely the claim that micro-structural ‘mechanisms’ provide evidence for the stability across populations of causal relationships ascertained at the (macro-) level of (test) populations. This claim is grounded in the epistemic account of causality developed by Williamson, an account which—while not relying exclusively on mechanistic evidence for justifying causal judgements—appeals nevertheless to (...) mechanisms, and rejects their anti-Humean interpretation in terms of capacities, powers, potencies, etc. By using (and expanding on) Cartwright’s basic critique against Humean mechanisms, I suggest that, in order to move beyond the level of plausibility, Williamson and Russo’s position is in need of a clarification as to the occurent reading of the components, functioning and interferences of mechanisms. Relatedly, as concerns Williamson’s epistemic account of causation, I argue that this account is in need of a more straightforward answer as to what truth-makers its causal claims should have. (shrink)

It is the aim of this paper to examine certain aspects of a point of view which has attracted much attention in physical methodology. This is the standpoint known as operationalism. We wish to discuss its significance in the construction and interpretation of physical theories.The essential meaning of operationalism in physics is that physical concepts should be defined in terms of actual physical operations. On this view there is no meaning to a concept unless it represents an operation which can (...) be performed in the laboratory. Thus the term “pressure of a gas” signifies nothing until an operation is described which constitutes the measurement of pressure. When one thinks of pressure one must think. of some actual apparatus, such as, for example, some glass and rubber tubing and some mercury and certain operations performed using these until finally one gets a pointer reading which one calls the pressure of the gas. The same stand is taken with respect to length, time, velocity, acceleration, temperature, etc. (shrink)

Nous ne livrons pas ici un travail sur mais avec Miguel Abensour. Plutôt qu'une présentation de son oeuvre, il s'agit de l'investir pour entrer en sympathie avec le mouvement même de sa pensée. Deux tâches s'imposent à l'interprète : systématiser Abensour et le prolonger. D'abord, bien que d'une grande cohérence, les idées d'Abensour ne font jamais l'objet d'une présentation unifiée et synthétique. Elles sont au contraire disséminées dans des dizaines d'articles n'ayant à première vue pas grand chose en commun. Sa (...) pensée est difficile à restituer car il ne s'agit pas d'un système philosophique. Abensour passe toujours par les textes des autres (Arendt, Lefort, Clastres, Saint-Just, etc.) pour construire le sien. Pour y voir plus clair dans une pensée de son propre aveu extrêmement complexe, il nous faut donc opérer une reconstruction systématique. Mais cette systématisation ne risque-t-elle pas de briser l'élan émancipateur qui se dégage à la lecture des textes de l'auteur? Car l'on sait l'attention méticuleuse qu'Abensour accorde à l'écriture philosophique : ne jamais clore les débats, ne fournir aucune réponse toute faite ni aucune solution, bref, entretenir une inquiétude susceptible de conduire le lecteur à penser par lui-même. La reconstruction systématique de cette pensée permettrait d'en saisir plus clairement les tenants et les aboutissants mais aurait pour défaut majeur de trahir Abensour en apportant des réponses là où l'auteur prenait soin de préserver une écriture placée sous le signe de l'incertitude? Pas nécessairement, car les éclaircissements et les "réponses" que nous apporterons visent moins à résoudre les énigmes qu'à les relancer, en déplaçant les termes, en les agençant autrement. Nos "réponses" ne mettront pas fin à la réflexion car l'étonnement philosophique sera préservé, réorienté et non refermé. Chaque solution entraînera une nouvelle question. De la sorte, nous resterons fidèles à Abensour, qui n'est pas l'avocat de l'absence de solution mais de l'absence de solution définitive qui viendrait clore la réflexion une fois pour toutes. (shrink)

The issue of the institution is not addressed systematically anywhere in the literature on Foucault, although it is everywhere to be found in Foucault's writings._ Foucault and the Critique of Institutions_ not only interprets the work of Foucault but also applies it to the question of the institution. Foucault is a master at analyzing the web of social relations that effectively shape the modern individual. While these social relations are smaller and finer than institutions, institutions are, by Foucault's account, saturated (...) with such relations. This study is the first sustained account to follow up the implications of Foucault's provocative theses about power for the analysis of institutions. _Foucault and the Critique of Institutions _offers a set of preliminary essays that raise basic questions about the theoretical character of Foucault's thought and then several groups of other essays that go on to take up the practical issues raised by his work. Joseph Margolis and Jitendra Mohanty address one of the most complex problems posed by Foucault's texts: his status as a philosopher. Mark Poster explores the problem of the "self" in Foucault, while Judith Butler focuses her searching investigation of the self on its gendered nature. Joseph Rouse examines the functioning of the natural sciences within the institutional setting of the university and the academic profession, while Chuck Dyke and Mary Schmelzer present vigorous critiques of the normalizing power of the university. Robert Moore and Mark Yount offer original studies of the implications of Foucault's work for the workplace, labor law, and affirmative action. Finally, John Caputo studies Foucault's famous history of madness and raises the question of the possibility of exercising a "healing" and not merely a "normalizing" power in the mental hospital and the church. (shrink)

This dissertation is an attempt at harmonizing hermeneutics. In particular, what I term the normative and descriptive approaches are explored and brought together. A normative approach is one concerned with providing the correct method for gaining knowledge of the meaning of a text. Beardsley's normative method of relying on the "text itself" is considered and rejected. Hirsch's normative method of relying on authorial intention is considered, criticized, and used as a springboard to my own normative method of urinterpretation. Propaedeutic to (...) the articulation of urinterpretation is an answer to the question: What is an author? After a survey of theories of authorship, I propose my own author construct--the urauthor. In constructing the urauthor we go back as far as possible to the model of the original. In urinterpretation we seek authorial intention on the basis of the urauthor. It is argued that through this method we secure the meaning of a text. ;Descriptive hermeneutics is concerned with describing the phenomenon of interpretive understanding. It eschews questions of epistemological method, which are at the center of a normative approach, in favor of an ontology of interpretive understanding. Gadamer's Truth and Method is the most complete philosophical account of descriptive hermeneutics to date, and accordingly our attention to descriptive hermeneutics is largely a critique of Gadamer's work. It is argued that both normative and descriptive hermeneutics can and should coexist, but to facilitate scholarship each should be explored separately. ;Interpretation and criticism are also harmonized. Interpretation is understood as the project of seeking the meaning of a text. The meaning of a text, it is argued, is discovered by seeking authorial meaning through the urauthor. Criticism is understood as the project of seeking the significance of a text. The significance of a text, it is argued, is its meaning-as-related-to: to me, to you, to our time, etc. The harmonization of interpretation and criticism is briefly explored in typical philosophical, literary, theological, and legal texts. (shrink)

In the “Critique of Pure Reason” and subsequent “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics...”, “Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science”, “Opus Postumum” Kant develops one of the modes of his transcendentalism, the metaphysics of possible experience, whose task is to study the transcendental conditions for the possibility of our (cognition), which, according to Kant, has a priori character. P. Strawson calls this mode of metaphysics ‘ descriptive metaphysics ’ and connects it with the analyzing the ‘conceptual structure’ of our thinking about the (...) world. The contemporary realistic trend (primarily within the framework of the analytical philosophical tradition) in the interpretation of Kant’s transcendental philosophy is associated with the modern theory of “two aspects” (80s of the 20th century), which replaced the classical theory of “two objects/worlds” (compare also with the opposition “ theory of appearance vs. theory of appearances ”). Within the framework of this theory, the Kantian ‘appearance’ receives an objectified status, it is not our mental representation, but corresponds (as its signs) to really existing things, or Kantian ‘objects of experience’. The article traces the formation of the historical and conceptual background of the ‘ metaphysics of experience ’ (H. Paton's original expression). Historically, the metaphysics of experience inherits the neo-Kantian approach to interpreting Kant's transcendentalism as a ‘theory of experience’ (H. Cohen, E. Cassirer), then it develops in logical positivism/empiricism (H. Reichenbach, R. Carnap; further in post-posivivism: the theory of I. Lakatos and T. Kuhn), analytical philosophy of science (W. Sellars, G. Buchdal, H. Putnam), and at present the metaphysics of experience is developing in a number of contemporary works of an analytical orientation (P. Strawson, K. Ameriks, L. Allais and etc.). (shrink)

The Complaint Model is an interpretation of Scanlon’s contractualism which holds that (1) an individual can reasonably reject a distribution of well-being when her complaint against that distribution is larger than any other person’s complaint against any other distribution. The Complaint Model further holds that (2) the size of an individual’s complaint against a distribution is a function of (2a) her absolute level of well-being under that distribution, with the size of her complaint increasing as her absolute level of well-being (...) decreases, and (2b) the size of her loss in well-being under that distribution relative to the level of well-being she could have enjoyed under the distribution most favourable to her, with the size of her complaint increasing as her loss increases. In this paper, I argue that the Complaint Model should be rejected, because the way in which it takes individuals’ losses into account leads to strongly counterintuitive results. In particular, I show that the Complaint Model may sacrifice the well-being associated with the least-well-off, secondleast-well-off, etc. positions for the sake of minimizing the largest complaint. I also argue that revisions to element (1) to allow for the aggregation of complaints must either leave the Complaint Model vulnerable to this objection or lead it to collapse into prioritarianism. The failure of the Complaint Model may lead us to search for an alternative way of taking losses into account. I conclude by arguing that the attractiveness of the Anonymous Pareto principle poses a challenge to any such alternative. (shrink)

Pramāṇavādins are antirealists on the problem of universals by virtue of the fact that they deny the existence of real universals. Dignāga, therefore, offered apoha theory to explain how the denotation of objects is possible without postulating real universals. According to Apohavāda, a word, for instance “cow”, denotes a cow not by referring to a real universal “cowness,” but by excluding it from those which are non-cows, such as horses. In recent years, there is a discussion about what the genuine (...) cause of exclusion in Dignāga’s apoha theory is. One line of interpretation suggests that, in the case of the word “cow,” the cause of exclusion is _sāsnādidarśana_ (perception of dewlap, etc.). On the other hand, some scholars maintain that it should be _adṛṣṭ__i_ (non-observation) or _adarśanamātra_ (mere non-observation) instead of _sāsnādidarśana_. The present paper consists of two parts. The first part will be an elaboration on the philosophical implications of the abovementioned philological inquiry. I will show that if the cause of exclusion is _sāsnādidarśana_, then Dignāga should be considered as a conceptualist about universals and a foundationalist about human cognitions. On the contrary, if it is _adṛṣṭ__i_, then Dignāga should be characterized as a nominalist as well as an antifoundationalist. In the second part, l will explore what the cause of exclusion is through a Mādhyamika critic of Dignāga, namely Bhāviveka. I will demonstrate that the critique of apoha theory launched by Bhāviveka indicates that Dignāga does not regard _sāsnādidarśana_ as the cause of excluding non-cows. (shrink)

Ce livre commence avec un problème de nomination de ce que l'on appelle économie et avec la disparition du terme chrématistique. Il pose l'hypothèse qu'il s'agit d'un problème métaphysique d'interprétation du réel et du monde. Le livre continue avec l'hypothèse étrange qui consiste à dire que la disparition du terme chrématistique est en lien avec la transformation substantielle et radicale du terme poièsis. Il pose alors la thèse qu'il y a une source fondamentale pour penser le problème de l'agir et (...) de l'opérativité et pour interpréter ce que l'on nomme une économie de l'œuvre. Enfin ce livre indique des manières de lire l'œuvre moderne et contemporaine en supposant qu'il y a eu, à cet endroit, un irrémédiable tournant : c'est ce que nous appelons critique de la poièsis. Ce livre pourra être lu de trois manières différentes et conjointes : comme un traité métaphysique de l'opérativité et de la disqualification des agir, comme un traité esthétique pour la lecture moderne du concept de poièsis (autrement dit de l'œuvre et de ses crises) et enfin comme un traité de philosophie politique en vue de faire face à ce qui tient de notre extrême et scandaleux contemporain. (shrink)

Cohen’s hostility to Rawls’ justification of the Difference Principle by social facts spawned Cohen’s general thesis that ultimate principles of justice and morality are fact-insensitive, but explain how any fact-sensitive principle is grounded in facts. The problem with this thesis, however, is that when facts F ground principle P, reformulating this relation as the "fact-insensitive" conditional “If F, then P” is trivial and thus explanatorily impotent. Explanatory, hence justificatory, force derives either from subsumption under more general principles, or precisely exhibiting (...) value in light of relevant (actual or hypothetical) facts. In examples where no subsumption occurs, actual facts trivially become hypothetical facts in "fact-insensitive" conditionals, an empty formalism. Indeed, Rawls’ grounding of principles of justice in “conditions of life” can easily be reformulated as a conditional principle “sensitive” only to hypothetical such conditions, and thus formally fact-insensitive in Cohen's sense, for all Cohen’s ire against Rawls’s grounding.Moreover, any plausible “ultimate fact-insensitive principle” must be intricately qualified, which tacit ceteris paribus clauses mask. Each qualification implies prioritisation of one principle over another in conceivable circumstances, and wherever the now qualified principle is given scope, that too implies prioritisation over competing principles in typical circumstances. Any principle is thus sensitive to conceivable circumstances of application, as recognised by more sophisticated intuitionisms. Non-trivial ultimate principles – luck egalitarianism, act utilitarianism, etc. - require defense, which inevitably involves showing how they best interpret and respond to facts about human needs, goals, and capacities in predictable circumstances. Finally, the substantive debate between Rawls and Cohen about which facts are relevant to the DP is only obscured by the doctrine of fact-insensitivity. (shrink)

Criticism in philosophy goes in accordance with general skeptical scientific attitude toward results of a research. The latter are to be achieved, presupposed, given as data and become to be verified or falsified, questioned by critique, analyzing etc. Criticism is improved mean to avoid persuasion and relativism, but (as selected sample versions of philosophical criticism will illustrate, in particular critical legacy of I. Kant, H. Putnam and L. Wittgenstein, especially via resolute interpretation of his views by J. Conant) all three (...) methodological attitudes are mutually correlated, sometimes even viciously. Relativism appears to be less vicious, because it could be treated as performative: relativism is relative. Attention to performativity of relativism can provide for its contextual validity and relativity. (shrink)

This dissertation is devoted to dual-process theories, widely discussed in the recent literature in cognitive science. The author argues for a significantly modified version of the account suggested by Samuels (2009), replacing the distinction between ‘Systems’ with a distinction between ‘Types of processes,’ which allows a critique of both the (only) modularist accounts and the accounts describing a deep difference between two systems each having their specificities (functional, phenomenological and neurological). In the account of dual-process theories developed here, the distinction (...) between ‘Types of processes’ is considered, a priori, only as a heuristic distinction allowing to better understand the mind and to explain some of its properties. The main idea defended in this dissertation is that cognitive processes should be distinguished by their position in a multidimensional conceptual space allowing researchers to consider all of the characteristics and peculiarities attributed to a process, which is preferable to accounts forcing the process into either ‘System’ or either ‘Type’ identified in the most influential approaches (cf. Evans, 2008). Once this research program is in place, it will become possible to revise the concepts used and the categories defined to ground anew some of the notions we find in the literature (‘module,’ ‘System 1 / 2,’ etc.). The argument is made in three steps: -/- 1) The first chapter aims at a clarification of the notion of ‘module’ commonly used in cognitive science. Against the accounts aiming at a weakening of the notion in order to classify all of the mind’s processes as modular, the author – following most notably Faucher and Poirier (2009) and Samuels (2006) – casts doubt on how this notion is used by many influential authors, particularly in evolutionary psychology (e.g. Barrett, Carruthers, Cosmides, Tooby). -/- 2) The objective of the second chapter is to present, examine and criticize many dual-process theories and to suggest that no theory currently discussed is adequate to describe the architecture of mind. The accounts, especially influent or representative, suggested by Stanovich (1999; 2004; 2009), by Evans (2008; 2009), by Lieberman (2007; 2009) and by Carruthers (2006; 2009), are examined. -/- 3) In the third chapter, the author criticizes the framework developed by Samuels (2009) before developing his own account of dual-process theories and discussing some of its advantages. (shrink)

Since its inception in 1994, scriptural reasoning has been practiced by academics and religious laypeople on an international scale. Scriptural reasoning is an activity or practice where Jews, Christians, and Muslims read and study together short passages from their traditionally sacred texts. In this book, Jacob L. Goodson describes this activity by giving a tour through modern philosophy and showing how certain arguments, ideas, and theories from modern philosophers help make sense of this inter-religious practice. According to Goodson, one of (...) the most interesting aspects of the practice of scriptural reasoning concerns how its driven by a tension between pragmatism and semiotics—what he calls purposefulness (pragmatism) vs. playfulness (semiotics) throughout the book. Can inter-religious practices only be playful, in terms of an academic “leisure activity”? Or do inter-religious practices need to strive toward a greater end or even a higher purpose, such as peace-making among the Abrahamic faiths or inter-religious friendships? In each individual chapter, Goodson explores this tension within the practice of scriptural reasoning. Utilizing Immanuel Kant’s deontology, Goodson concludes by demonstrating how the practice of scriptural reasoning might work if only two rules are in place while participating in it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.1 (2005) 21-36 [Access article in PDF] Desgabets on the Creation of Eternal Truths Monte Cook For many philosophers Robert Desgabets's1 doctrine of the creation of eternal truths will be of interest for the light it throws on Descartes's doctrine of the creation of eternal truths, a doctrine receiving considerable scrutiny the past several years.2 Desgabets was one of the few followers of (...) Descartes to defend this doctrine; and he not only defended it, he made it central to his philosophy.3 He spoke of the [End Page 21] doctrine as "being of the greatest importance and having great and incomparable consequences;" and he referred to it as being "so lofty, so fine, so saintly and so worthy of God" that Descartes ought never to have departed from it (RD 208, 209).4 But, Desgabets thinks, Descartes sometimes forgets his own doctrine and says things incompatible with it. More important, he thinks, Descartes fails to realize how important the doctrine is and fails to extend it to its full consequences. In Desgabets we get from a Cartesian and a near contemporary of Descartes: an interpretation of Descartes's doctrine of the creation of eternal truths, a criticism of Descartes's version of the doctrine purportedly based on Descartes's own principles, and the development of the supposedly correct version of the doctrine that Descartes would have advocated had he been truer to his own principles.5Recent discussions have brought to the fore several controversies about how to interpret Descartes's comments on the creation of the eternal truths. I piece together both where Desgabets's own doctrine stands on these controversies and how Desgabets interprets Descartes's position on them, and I note some consequences that Desgabets draws from the doctrine that are clearly opposed to Descartes's explicit views. 1. Desgabets's Interpretation of Descartes In Critique de la Critique, Desgabets first states Descartes's doctrine of the creation of eternal truths as follows: That the Whole is greater than its part, that the circle has its diameters equal, that man is a rational animal, that two & two are four, etc., are not such of themselves but... God has made & established them with a sovereign indifference being able not to establish them so that what is now true & necessary should not be so if he had not established it. (CdC 73) This states the core of Descartes's doctrine of the creation of eternal truths, and I doubt that anyone would deny that it is in Descartes.In the next paragraph, however, Desgabets both expands and limits the scope of what he takes to be Descartes's doctrine: Descartes claims that there is neither nature, nor essence, nor reality, nor conceivability, nor truth among created things that God has not made or established with a sovereign indifference, so that before we conceive that he has freely resolved to make & establish things & truths there is nothing conceivable except his unique Essence. And we must not listen to those who say that before his free decrees & before his [End Page 22] indifferent action he already necessarily saw natures & determined essences that had by themselves a real possibility that they did not owe to him & that distinguished them from chimeras & beings of reason. (CdC 74) Whether or not Descartes subscribes to the views expressed in this paragraph, they clearly go beyond the core doctrine of the creation of eternal truths expressed in the previous paragraph.First, Desgabets expands Descartes's doctrine to include opposition not just to the view that the eternal truths exist independently of God, but also to the view that God creates by giving actual existence to pre-existent essences that determine what is possible. Desgabets believes that for Descartes God does not create by contemplating pre-existent essences, to some of which he gives actual existence. Rather, God creates the essences themselves (cf. RD 32-33, 232). Moreover, Desgabets believes that for Descartes God gives existence not just to essences but also to possibilities. God does not confront... (shrink)

In this paper I explicate a technique which can be used to make subtle relational features of experience more evident to awareness. Results of this method could be employed to diffuse one intuition that drives the common critique of functionalist-information theoretic accounts of mind that "qualia" cannot be exhaustively characterized in information theoretic-functional terms. An intuition that commonly grounds this critique is that the qualitative aspects of experience do not entirely appear in consciousness as informational-functional structures. The first section of (...) the paper is a schematic overview of nature of the qualitative and the problem that qualia are taken to create for information theoretic-functionalist theories of mind. §2 contains a précis of the concept of different levels of functional scale in mental activity that was developed by Armstrong and the Churchlands and that is needed to interpret (possible) results of the proposed experiment. In §3, I outline a method whereby analogies would be generated between purely relational forms, structures, configurations, etc. and purely qualitative aspects of experience. These analogies would be created by subjects through forced choice selection of presented images of structures that "most resembled" a pure quality. Repeated choices would then be shaped by a genetic program into the structural configuration that "most resembled" the pure quality. The final section of the paper explores how consistent, reliable results from the experiment would make information-theoretic functionalism more intuitively plausible in spite of the "fact" that the qualitative aspects of experience do not immediately appear as entirely relational/structural. (shrink)

This article argues that language without the body does not `mean' at all; corporeality provides language with meaning under socio-cultural constraints. Traditional ways of interpretation have been dominated by the transference of linguistic interpretation to the non-linguistic. At the same time, traditional linguistically focused interpretation is heavily laden with orthodox value systems. This makes the body a secondary phenomenon. In many art forms, however, the body is primary and yet transient. This requires a reversal of traditional approaches. Recent liminal performances (...) have attempted to offer a non-verbal critique of both that linguistic dominance and such value orthodoxy. Unless the immediacy of the body, including corporeal readings (visual, tactile, haptic, olfactory, gustatory, kinetic, proximic, etc.) is made the focus of interpretation, such recent experimental genres as Viennese Actionism, Tanztheater, digitized music, high-definition television and its filmic consequences, cannot be appreciated. However, I suggest it would be a mistake to read their presentations of the immediacy of the body as an escape from representation altogether. Rather, what we are dealing with here is a radical transvaluation of corporeality. The article questions some recent theories from this perspective, using selected excerpts from liminal performances to illustrate this critique. (shrink)

The subject of this article is a study of the problem of metaphysical substantiation of aesthetics in Kant's philosophy, conducted during the analysis of two editions of the introduction to the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment. The results of the conducted research allow us to find out to what extent Kant's interpretation of aesthetics is metaphysically loaded. For the first time since Plato and Aristotle, the metaphysical horizon opens up again in Kantian aesthetics. Special attention is paid to the (...) consideration of the "Critique of the Power of Judgment" as the first work in the history of thought in which aesthetics appears as a system-forming element of the construction of metaphysics. Kant's aesthetics allows us to look at the current problems of the metaphysics of art again and in a new way; being a spiritual motivation for the transformation of human nature, it is something inextricably linked with the manifestation of the metaphysical in us. In domestic and foreign literature, only some approaches to this topic are outlined (V. F. Asmus, T. I. Oizerman, E. Kuenemann, etc.), the author's special contribution to the study of this topic is a holistic analysis of poorly formalized problems associated with the study of metaphysical structures of Kantian aesthetics, with the identification of relevant grounds for it. In both editions, we are talking about the metaphysical prolegomena of aesthetics as a kind of exegesis of the entire transcendental philosophy of Kant. At the same time, aesthetic reflection is embedded in metaphysics as a form of completion of the project of the entire culture of the human mind. The measurement of the aesthetic a priori leads to conclusions about ways to use means to achieve all the goals that befits humanity. (shrink)

In this paper, perhaps the first of its kind, an attempt is made to elucidate and examine the Vedantic theory of soul constructed on the basis of the experience of dreamless sleep which, being radically and qualitatively different from waking and dreaming states, is considered by the Vedantins as a state of temporarily purified individual soul (atman), a state of pure substantial consciousness. They take the experience of dreamless sleep as a model experience of the soul's final liberation from the (...) body and its internal as well as external faculties. The ultimate liberation, according to the Vedantins, is a state of total identification of the individual soul with the Universal Soul (Brahman), the summum bonum of every Vedantin. The paper also includes a critique of the Vedantic soul theory by the Buddhists who vehemently deny any autonomous and substantial soul whose essence is unchangingly permanent, pure consciousness and self-illuminating knowledge. The soul is instead interpreted by the Buddhists as a product of the functioning of a person's psycho-physical organism and a mere subject of knowing, thinking, desiring, etc. The analysis further shows that the Vedanta, especially the Advaita Vedanta, metaphysics of soul is inadequate in many respects and mainly based on a priori and scriptural arguments and emotive appeals, whereas the Buddhists deny any kind of autonomous and permanent agent of knowing, thinking and desiring by successfully reducing substantial consciousness to mere acts of knowing. (shrink)

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida is most well known for instituting the school, or method, known as deconstruction, whereby one…interprets? No, critiques? No, challenges? Perhaps, changes? Maybe, performs? Certainly. Performs what? Justice? Was Derrida, then, a political philosopher, and deconstruction a political philosophy? Many readers of Derrida see what they call a political “turn” in his work near the end of the 1980s or early 1990s, when the content dealt with within that period and after was that of traditionally “political” (...) themes (justice, law, friendship, immigration, etc.). But what makes a work, or thinker, political? I will argue…. (shrink)

"Si le "jargon de l'authenticité" a sans doute rendu nombre de phénoménologies incapables de penser l'histoire et le politique, Merleau-Ponty a su le faire au coeur des textes étrangement les moins commentés, dans leur lien même, ceux des cours au Collège de France de 1954-1955: L'Institution et La Passivité. Des cours que cet ouvrage se propose enfin de relire, en discussion serrée avec l'ensemble de l'oeuvre merleau-pontienne, tant celle qui les précède que celle qui leur succède, pour la dévoiler autrement. (...) Cela, en trois temps, qui sont autant de "lectures de Merleau-Ponty", et de portes d'entrée dans son oeuvre la moins connue. Trois temps formant les parties de cet ouvrage qui suivent l'élaboration du concept merleau-pontien d'institution dans son rapport même à la passivité, sans chronologie fixe, et sans voeu de systématicité, mais en tentant d'être fidèle à la rédaction même de ces notes de cours d'une rare densité. Des cours qui foisonnent de références, tant à son oeuvre propre qu'aux nombreux auteurs avec lesquels Merleau-Ponty dialogue, tissant ainsi de nouveaux liens thématiques, et n'hésitant pas, par exemple, au coeur même d'un chapitre sur le vivant, à évoquer la question de la révolution marxiste. De Ruyer, Gesell, Lévi-Strauss, Alquié, Lachièze-Rey, à Sartre et Freud, etc., ce sont autant de dialogues qui éclairent en effet l'oeuvre et l'auto-critique de Merleau-Ponty, qui se confronte ici, mieux que nulle part ailleurs, à l'échec de son oeuvre passée, comme au contexte de l'époque. Plutôt qu'une exégèse ou qu'une interprétation orthodoxe, il s'agit au fond de continuer la pensée de Merleau-Ponty en questionnant ses dilemmes, ceux de la praxis mais aussi et en amont ceux de la méthode entre analogie et métaphore, en puisant à des essais qu'il aura en partie abandonnés, et qui nous semblent pourtant les plus prometteurs. D'où le pluriel, encore, de ces lectures."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Tato studie mapuje vývoj Brentanova pojetí pravdy a ontologie, která se s jednotlivými pokusy po definici pravdy pojí. Nejprve je představena Brentanova raná koncepce pravdy jako shody soudu a předmětu soudu. Jsou ukázány problémy, na které Brentano ve svém korespondenčním pojetí pravdy narazil. Tyto problémy se týkají zejména zvláštních typů entit, které mají ručit za pravdivost soudů, jež vypovídají o neexistujících předmětech, privacích etc. Tváří tvář těmto problémům Brentano svoji původní koncepci zavrhl a nahradil epistemickým pojetím pravdy jako evidence a (...) reduktivním pojetím nereálných předmětů, které jsou pouhým zdáním, jež v nás vzbuzuje nedostatečná analýza sémantické formy soudů. Studie předkládá v základních obrysech Brentanovo pojetí významu soudů o ireálných entitách podává a podrobuje ho kritice.The article describes the development of Brentano's conception of truth as well as the ontology which is closely connected to different attempts of Brentano's definition of truth. First of all comes Brentano's early view of truth as a correspondence between judgment and object into consideration. This conception brought Brentano face to face with peculiar kinds of entities which are to vouch for truth of judgments concerning non-existent objects, privations etc. Brentano was eventually forced to leave his original definition behind and substitute it with a new definition of truth as evidence. He also embraced a reductive stand towards supposedly unreal entities which are to be interpreted as fictions caused by insufficient analysis of semantic structures of judgments. The study ends with a presentation and critique of brentanian analysis of semantics of judgments concerning unreal objects. (shrink)

Contemporary scholars in Chinese philosophy, Thaddaeus particularly concerned about Chinese philosophy and methodological issues. Of this paper is designed to make way for the study of Chinese philosophy, the discussion to commemorate him, the first part will describe Thaddaeus study of Chinese philosophy, methods and contribution to the idea, the latter part of the study will be my personal view of Chinese philosophy, methods to further to call upon and complement. Thaddaeus based on the fundamental principles of truth and goodness, (...) the dominant theme proposed research method will be grouped into eight themes of Chinese philosophy, including political, moral, dominate the day, nature and personnel mutual induction, root cause of all things, all things and personnel often said, heaven and earth and man were one, nature, etc., as the dominant theme. According to his own analysis, the subject of legislation contains several levels: first, tracing the history of philosophy, including research. Second, as stressed by modern hermeneutics domain blend method, should not abuse their own perspective on things not related. Third, the logic and meaning of words in semantic analysis. Fourth, and Western philosophy for appropriate comparison. Furthermore, I propose, study Chinese philosophy, Chinese philosophy begins with the reading and interpretation of the text. I was reading Chinese philosophy of the original Code's fundamental idea, known as "dynamic context ism", in this fundamental principle, read the philosophy of the original Code, one must first follow the general text interpretation of the principles, including 1, the context within the principles of, 2, Combines the same principle, 3, minimum change principle 4, the maximum reading principles. Secondly, to respect the characteristics of Chinese philosophical texts, as opposed to harass the landlords like to use the concept of metaphor in philosophy like to use the text; like to use relative Seeger argument, in philosophy like to use narrative, to show the image of the concept of root causes, rather than pure ideas. Finally, the text should also be considered provided by the author or school of their own interpretation of the principle. In accordance with the above method, after reading the text can be more broad philosophical texts on the historical context, and even on different philosophical traditions to be compared. The most important thing is to play the role of analysis and critique of reason, to make their own original ideas. Among contemporary scholars of Chinese Philosophy, Thaddeus Hang is most famous for his concern with methodological problems in studying Chinese Philosophy. This paper contains two parts: first, an exposition of Thaddeus Hang's own method of studying Chinese Philosophy; second, a deeper reflections on methodology in studying Chinese philosophy. Thaddeus Hang proposes a method of studying Chinese Philosophy by dominant themes. For him there are eight major dominant themes in Chinese philosophy: Politics, Morality, Heaven as Ruler, Mutual affection / response between All things and Human Affairs, the Origin of all things, the Constant Way of all things and Human Affairs, Unity of Heaven, Earth and Man, and, he added later, the Nature. For him, we can take these eight dominant themes as criteria to judge the difference and development of different schools and philosophers in Chinese philosophy. These eight dominant themes should be applied on the following four methodological lines: first, one should trace the origin in the history of philosophy, including the investigation by evidences; second, one should look for the fusion of horizons as emphasized by contemporary hermeneutics and avoid subjective arrogance by emphasizing one's idiosyncrasies on irrelevant matters; third, one should use logical analysis and semantic analysis; fourth, one should do some comparison with Western philosophy. In the second part, I redefine Chinese philosophy and propose several levels of methodological principles in reading and philosophizing on Chinese philosophical texts: First, on the level of general hermeneutic, I propose the principle of intra-textuality; the principle of coherence, the principle of minimum emendation, and the principle of maximal reading. Second, we should pay attention to the hermeneutic characteristics of Chinese philosophy: targeting Idea-Image rather than Pure Ideas, Chinese philosophy prefers to show the movement of meaning by metaphors more than concepts, narrative of inner connected events more than logical argumentation. Third, one should pay attention to the hermeneutic principles or philosophy of language proposed by the author or the school of thoughts under investigation. The historical contextualization and comparative studies should base themselves on the previous work. Most importantly, an original way of philosophizing, based on analytic and critical skills, is invited in any philosophical study, no matter Chinese or Western. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mimesis, Violence, and Socially Engaged Buddhism: Overture to a Dialogue Leo D. Lefebure University ofSaint Mary ofthe Lake René Girard's analysis ofdesire, mimetic rivalry, and the surrogate victim mechanism seeks to transform human consciousness in order to overcome seemingly intractable patterns ofrivalry and violence. In this project the Buddhist tradition, with its long commitment to nonviolence, its age-old suspicion of ordinary views of the self, and its ancient experience (...) of meditation as a transformative practice, exerts a claim to attention. The Buddhist tradition shares many of Girard's concerns: It denies the reality ofan autonomous, independent selfand calls attention to the interdependence ofall realities. It challenges its followers to become conscious ofthe sources oftheir own feelings and thoughts, to accept responsibility for them, and to be liberated from violence. Like Girard, Buddhism rejects the notion that there can be "good violence" as well as bad. For Buddhists, awakening from the illusions of the autonomous selfand freedom from violence are inseparable. The term, "Socially Engaged Buddhism," refers to a variety ofBuddhist move-ments since the 1950s which seek to apply ancient Buddhist principles to contemporary social, economic, and political problems. Powerful prejudices, however, threaten this conversation before it begins. Since the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Max Weber, Westerners have often seen Buddhism as a pessimistic religion, a worldnegating tradition that encourages the individual to withdraw from the world and seek a solitary salvation. The belief in karma has often been 122Leo D. Lefebure interpreted as fatalistic and inimical to social transformation. Buddhism, especially in the Mahayana traditions, has often accommodated to the dominant powers in society without exerting any effective social or political critique. Like every other major religious tradition, Buddhism has had an ambiguous history; and Westerners have often assumed prematurely that Buddhism has no history of social and political engagement whatsoever. Girard himself, in conversation with Jean-Claude Dussault in 1981, viewed Buddhism as a withdrawal from action in the world. Girard commented: Alors il me semble que la non-violence des religions orientales est la recherche d'une position hors de la violence, nirvana, etc., au prix de toute action. Mais cette recherche abandonne le monde en quelque sorte à lui-même. Alors il me semble que s'il fallait résumer d'un mot, ce serait un mot comme dégagement absolu par rapport à l'existence. ("Séminaire de recherche" 81) [It seems to me that the nonviolence of Eastern religions is the search for a position outside of violence, nirvana, etc., at the price ofall action. But this search abandons the world in a way to itself. Now it seems to me that if it were necessary to sum it up in a formula, it would be a phrase such as absolute détachement in regard to existence.] Later in the conversation, Girard expressed his own negative reaction: "Si vous voulez, je me sens profondément gréco-biblico-occidental face à ce renoncement nirvanesque total." (83) [If you please, I feel myself profoundly greco-biblical-occidental in contrast to this complete nirvanesque renunciation.] According to Girard's interpretation, Buddhism offers no constructive solution to the social problems ofrivalry and violence, but only an individual escape through withdrawal. Closely related to Girard's negative view ofBuddhism is his interpretation ofall non-biblical religions as channeling violence but as powerless to break the cycle ofviolence. He claims that only biblical revelation offers a basis for overcoming the violence of the surrogate victim mechanism: "To recognize Christ as God is to recognize him as the only being capable of rising above the violence that had, up to that point, absolutely transcended mankind. Violence is the controlling agent in every form ofmythic or cultural structure, and Christ is the only agent who is capable of escaping from these structures and freeing us from their dominance" (1987, Mimesis, Violence, and Socially Engaged Buddhism 123 219). Girard asserts that there is no common ground between the violenceridden mythologies which dominate all other religions and the revelation of God in Christianity (1986, 166). Girard is almost Barthian in his exclusivistic claims for Christian revelation, viewing all other religions as products of human mimetic striving and only Christianity as the true... (shrink)

An attempt has been made in this paper to trace Gandhi's principle of 'nonviolence' in the context of 'Enlightenment Rationality' on the one hand and 'Globalization' on the other. The ideas of freedom/independence, autonomy, sovereignty, property, maturity/adulthood, public and private, tolerance, scientific rationality, secularism, humanism, democracy, nation/ state, universality of moral actions, humanity as an end in itself, critique of religion, etc., are the most operative terms of European Enlightenment of the 19th century. Though these ideas evolved and developed in (...) Europe, yet they proliferated beyond Europe to other continents and subcontinents. Gandhi appreciated these ideas and like a genius, he interpreted them into indigenous concepts and principles such as truth, simplicity, faith, brahmacharya, purushartha, satyagraha, swaraj, karma, compassion, trusteeship, vegetarianism/fruitarianism and above all nonviolence with the aim of attaining swaraj - victory over one's passions, lusts, greed, etc., and independence and sovereignty of the country. I may point out, though I shall not be in a position to develop it here, that the basic concepts of the Enlightenment were questioned and repudiated by Marx, Engels and Lenin on the one hand and the critical theorists like Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Habermas on the other. In the era of globalization, the Enlightenment concepts have become almost obsolete. But Gandhi's principles are still valid. These are the only viable principles to resolve moral dilemmas that everybody faces, being constantly confronted by equally valid alternatives in globalization. Hence I'll propose a modest critique of the Enlightenment and the globalization from Gandhi's perspective of nonviolence. (shrink)

In 1913, in a draft for a new Preface for the second edition of the Logical Investigations, Edmund Husserl reveals to his readers that "The source of all my studies and the first source of my epistemological difficul­ties lies in my first works on the philosophy of arithmetic and mathematics in general", i.e. his Habilitationsschrift and the Philosophy of Arithmetic: "I carefully studied the consciousness constituting the amount, first the collec­tive consciousness (consciousness of quantity, of multiplicity) in its simplest and (...) higher levels (consciousness of sums, sums of sums etc.). I immediately separated proper (intuitive) and symbolic consciousness, in the characteriza­tion of the former I hit the radical difference of categorial consciousness [...] and sensuous consciousness of unity." Later on, in the Third Investigation, Husserl makes some very specific claims, that are of considerable importance to assess the development of his early works and their relation to his later phenomenology: "This first work of mine (an elaboration of my Habilitationsschrift, [...], 1887) should be compared with all assertions of the present work on compounds, moments of unity, complexes, wholes and objects of higher order. I am sorry that in many recent treatments of the doctrine of "Gestalt-qualities", this work has mostly been ignored, though quite a lot of the thought-content of later treatments by Cornelius, Meinong etc., of questions of analysis, apprehension of plurality and complexion is already to be found, differently expressed, in my Philosophy of Arithmetic. I think it would still be of use today to consult this work on the phenomenological and ontological issues in question, especially since it is the first work that attached importance to acts and objects of higher order and investigated them thoroughly." Hence, at the time of the Ideas, Husserl retrospectively considers his first works4 as being still relevant for phenomenological issues. Not only does Husserl advance a very interesting priority claim with respect to Von Ehrenfels’ development of the notion of Gestalt and Meinong’s development of Gegenstandstheorie, but also a strong affirmation of continuity and coherence of his position from 1887 all the way up to 1913, encompassing the alleged “revolution” in his position from psychologism to anti-psycho­logism in the 1890s. Indeed, according to much of the recent secondary literature, in 1894, right in the middle of the ten “incubation” years between the Philosophy of Arithmetic and the Logical Investigations, Frege’s destruc­tive review would have converted Husserl to antipsychologism practically overnight. This gives us two conflicting interpretations: on the one hand, Husserl himself in 1913 still seems to approve of the Philosophy of Arithmetic and even considers it to contain valuable phenomenological material, on the other, it is routinely dismissed by much of the secondary literature as hope­lessly psychologistic. So which one is it: do we have a phenomenological arithmetic or a psychologistic arithmetic in Husserl’s first book? On balance, I think that Husserl in his Philosophy of Arithmetic developed a position that does not fall prey to the exaggerated and poorly aimed critiques of Frege, while at the same time, as a descriptive psychology of the genesis and constitution of number, it can certainly be considered as providing phenome­nologically meaningful analyses, though of course not made from within an explicitly transcendental phenomenological framework. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is, firstly, to explicate and give a critical assessment of the methodological, epistemological, and philosophical foundations that led to the “rhetorical turn” in modern philosophy, and, secondly, to answer the question of how justified the grounds for such a “rhetorical turn” are. The answer proposed is based on a reconstruction of Eugene Dupréel’s critical arguments that were directed against the “classical philosophy” and their reception in Chaim Perelman’s works during his “turning point” period (1947 – (...) 1949). The article proves that these two scholars’ critique of classical philosophy proceeds from a realistic position, therefore it does not apply to the epistemological principles of idealistic philosophy. Their criticism of the classical theory of progress and the ideal of universally valid knowledge is “axiological” in nature and boils down to a reassessment of all traditional values. As a result of this reassessment, the methodological principles of sophistry (subjectivism, pragmatism, pluralism, relativism, conventionalism, etc.) are actually rehabilitated. The criticism of philosophy that appeals to spoken language and everyday knowledge, is not justified, since it is based on a misunderstanding of the conceptual and constructive nature of the philosophical language. Although the rhetorical analysis of philosophical texts should be recognized as fruitful and useful, rhetoric cannot be an instrument of philosophizing, since the interpretation of values depends on their understanding, which is given by “classical philosophy”. (shrink)

When contemporary continental philosophy dismisses, with the discourse of post-modernism, the role of origin, teleology, foundation, etc., it is forsaking its own style of thinking and as a consequence is no longer able to discern crises of lived-meaning or to engage in the transformation of historical life. I address this crisis by characterizing continental philosophy as a particular style of thinking, generative thinking. I then examine the meaning and origins of philosophical thinking by drawing, for strategic reasons, on Jacques Derrida's (...) essay Cogito et histoire de la folie. For not only has the very question of origins come under fire through various post-modern readings of Derrida, but Derrida's own point of critique concerning Western Metaphysics depends upon a specific understanding of origin that I call origin-originating. In the final section of this paper. I interpret the crisis within continental philosophy as a forgetting the point of origin-originating within the generative structure of experience. (shrink)

[Holbrook's] is one of the keenest and deepest critical minds in the field of Islamic literature. She provides for the reader (scholar and lay persona alike) fascinating insights into the genre, poetic functions, mystical allegory, narrative technique, audience response, etc. Many of her analyses are scintillating.... The Holbrook volume is a landmark in Ottoman literary scholarship. --MESA Bulletin... a major contribution to Ottoman and Turkish literary study--I frankly am at a loss to describe how major.... Dr. Holbrook's book will make (...) its own category and subsequent publication in the field will be judged in relation to it. --Walter G. Andrews, professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, University of Washington When the Ottoman Turkish Empire was divided into modern states after World War I, in Turkey a change of alphabet and radical linguistic reform aimed to free modern Turkish literature from intellectual ties to the East. Holbrook recuperates Ottoman debates on the existential status of language and social value of art with a poetics of Beauty and Love, the philosophical fairy tale in verse by Seyh Galib. Where does language come from? How does a poet conceive imagery? What rights to interpretive authority does Muslim law accord the individual when God's word is law? Holbrook's lively analysis ranges an intertext of genres in Arabic and Persian as well as Turkish. The romance of separated lovers is a paradigm of journeys that lead beyond discourse. A poet's quest for originality reveals an archaeology of modernism. Holbrook traces the revolutionary polemic and Orientalist philology that de-aestheticized Ottoman poetry, bringing the critique of Orientalismto bear upon the Ottoman center Orientalism suppressed. (shrink)

One cannot really speak of a school of personalistic economists. Moreover, there is a wide gulf between the economic philosophy of the personalists and the mathematical context of economic science. Since the thirties, philosophers such as Alexandre Marc, Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier and many others have been searching, on the basis of a personalistic view of man, for a `third way' between individualistic capitalism and statist socialism , but there was seldom interest from the side of the scientific economists.Fortunately, there (...) are some notable exceptions. François Perroux, Kenneth Boulding, Ernst Schumacher, Serge Christophe Kolm, and Amartya Sen are economists who, in various ways, have attempted to bridge the gulf between the personalistic view of man and economic rationality. By carrying out an immanent critique of some of the standard economic assumptions, they opened a path for a normative economics that was clearly distinct from a purely positive economics as well as from Pareto's welfare economics. One can affix various labels to these attempts: humanistic economics , socio-economics , moral economics . In what follows, I shall interpret these attempts as initiatives in the direction of a personalistic economics. I would also situate the current research in `economics and ethics', which is becoming part of the mainstream of economic thought, and which has received official recognition with the recent Nobel prize award to Sen, within this tendency towards a more personalistic economics.Attention to moral feelings, human rights, altruistic motives, justice and solidarity, non-profit organizations, etc., contribute to situating the economic problem in a field where economics, politics and ethics no longer function as three distinct domains but where their interaction is central.Yet does this interactive economics fit into a personalistic way of thinking? Is a generalized system theory not more attractive? System theory has a different focus than personalistic economics. System theory considers the axioms of system equilibrium and sustainable growth as the ultimate horizon, whereas a personalist sees them as merely important conditions for a good society and economy. However refined it may be, system theory views the person from an external point of view, while the personalist refers to the internal experience of human freedom and meaning as something that transcends and regulates the system's functionality.One could object that neo-classical economists do not use system theory as their point of departure. In their eyes, system equilibrium is the result of the utility-maximizing behaviour of individuals. These individuals subjectively determine what their preferences are and then act accordingly. Is this openness for a free, utility-maximizing actor — where there is room for both material and immaterial, egoistic and altruistic preferences — not sufficient to speak of a personalistic economics ? If this were true, then the discourse of personalism would be more or less superfluous.I take the term `personalistic economics' to refer to a normative economics that does not simply reconstruct the problem of efficient allocation as an individual or social problem of utility, but in the first instance as a problem of human dignity and social justice. To reduce the problem of human choice to a problem of subjective utility is in itself a far-reaching normative standpoint. As soon as one realizes this, there is no reason to exclude other normative assumptions, such as personalistic ones. (shrink)

This article focuses on Max Horkheimer’s criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology in basic philosophical matters such as method, theory, logic, truth, metaphysics, etc. Horkheimer objects to Husserl’s conception of philosophy as a mathesis universalis and of science as relativistic research. However, he finds Husserl’s criticism of scientific rationalism the most important step for the legitimacy of philosophy. According to him, Husserl’s method is intended to be a science of apriority. But his understanding of apriority is static, is radically abstract, and overlooks (...) the dialectical relation. Therefore, his method is ahistorical and undialectical. Horkheimer does not interpret Husserl’s idealism in the sense of classical idealism. However, he believes that the positivistic and Cartesian implications in Husserl’s philosophy made his method less fruitful in concrete situations. Consequently, he calls Husserl’s phenomenology abstract positivism, traditional theory and a bourgeois ideology. Horkheimer’s critique focuses on Husserl’s early period of phenomenology. (shrink)

I undertake to explain how the well known laws of formal logic – Barbara Syllogism, modus ponens, etc. – relate to experience by developing Edmund Husserl's critique ofFormalism and Psychologism in logical theory and then briefly explaining his positive views of the laws of logic. His view rests upon his understanding of the proposition as a complex, intentional property. The laws of formal logic are, on his view (and mine), statements about the truth values of propositions as determined by their (...) formal character and relationships alone. The laws thus understood explain how algorithms set up to mirror them can accomplish what they do to advance knowledge, even though they operate purely mechanically. Further, they explain the proper sense in which formal laws "govern," and may guide, processes of actual thinking. Husserl's theory is a realist theory in the sense that, on his interpretation, the laws of pure or formal logic hold true regardless of what any individual, culture or species may or may not think, or even if no thinking ever occurs. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 125-128. What is the nature of sound? What is the nature of volume? William James, in attempting to address these simple questions wrote, “ The voluminousness of the feeling seems to bear very little relation to the size of the ocean that yields it . The ear and eye are comparatively minute organs, yet they give us feelings of great volume” (203-­4, itals. original). This subtle extensivity of sensation finds its peer in the subtle yet significant influence (...) of habituated action upon our lives. This expansive quality of habit­making is what Craig Dongoski's bodies of work enable us to appreciate. Nearly ten years ago Dongoski had a habit of turning on his audio recorder every day at three o'clock for three minutes. No matter what the setting, what the activity, Dongoski recorded the ambient sounds in his environment at that moment. As it happened, one day he was teaching a drawing class and he recorded the sounds of their pencils scratching across their respective surfaces. This was a critical moment for him. Later he would place a contact mic onto a drawing surface and record the sound of his signature. Signatures change over time, they respond to the conditions in which they are performed. Signatures speak volumes about the author, but a practice of attunement is required for the volume to be audible. To hear all that a signature can tell about its author, the listener must tune into the frequency at which this information is being broadcast. Dongoski's drawings and video works draw­out the peculiar artifact that habit makes of living: habits establish a tempo of living and it seems that one's habitus is the signature of habitual living. I sat down with Craig in an attempt to sound­out some of the depths of thought in his practice. What follows is selected from our conversation. Paul Boshears (PB): Clearly your work is dealing with time: from the painstaking action of rendering the drawing to the free­form approach of launching a microphone into a body of water and waiting to see what's recorded. Craig Dongoski (CD): Are we talking about the films or the drawings? PB: Well, it's a bit of both in my mind. I know the drawings on first glance seem to be these flows of lines without concern but I realize that there is this painstaking action involved. CD: I'm interested in time because I'm interested in forms outside of control, outside of politics, and outside of economics. I think that art, when it's alive, does go beyond those. I'm interested in duality and paradox—a stream of contradiction, I suppose. For instance, scale and size. There is a tendency to think that these are the same thing. But really you can have something small that has a lot of scale—look at Goya's drawings, Los Caprichos , they're very small but they have a lot of scale. Likewise things that are spontaneous don't necessarily mean that they take only two or three seconds to do. This latter distinction is what I'm most interested in. Having that appearance of spontaneity. The image has rhythm, you can latch onto it; but the reality is that it took many hours—and many months in some cases—to arrive at. And this is in keeping with geological time. I like to insert this series of thoughts into my work sometimes as an attempt to make some of this stuff comprehensible. There are all these distractions inundating us throughout our days now. Time gets tweaked by all these technologies that we interact with daily. There's more than just digital time or the mechanical time of your watch. There's biological time, that time in which you're growing. PB: I'm reminded of McLuhan here: he made his career by making that strong claim that the humans of today are not the same humans of three generations ago because technology has fundamentally changed us. Are we not the same human beings as a hundred years ago? CD: I mean, I don't think we're the same human beings that we were when he was around! It's my understanding that before painting a flower, monks would meditate for hours on that flower and then they would complete the painting of that flower in less than a minute. That's what I want to point out about our world today, we have all this information, but how much of it are we metabolizing? PB: Is there a message you're looking for? Or that you're trying to share? CD: These drawings set­up the circumstances for me to continue them forever. I'm only about six years into it, but with more time, things can unfold. You know? If you take this cup of coffee and vow to restrict your work to only this material and medium for seven years—you'll make interesting work. The problem is that most people can't hold on to things or they give up or they get distracted. They don't trust that anything is possible; anything is potential material. Staying with this cup of coffee example, we can get enveloped in the history of the recycling logo, or the process for harvesting coffee and so on. The same is true for my work as it has lead me into places like graphical music scores. I had, of course, known about John Cage's notations and I'd always been interested in sound itself, but this drawing practice made it feasible to explore the intersections in a meaningful way. I think that if you trust your instincts and your curiosities and your abilities, then the bus drives itself. Look at Roman Opalka, he's kind of the patron saint of time painting. The claim is that no one can count to a billion in a lifetime so he's set­out to paint to seven sevens (7,777,777). He began with white numbers on a black field but over the years he has gradually reduced the black field to ever­lightening grays. His plan is to paint these seven sevens on what ostensibly will be white on white. PB: It occurs to me that I've never thought of the actual, literal, meaning of “microphone” in relation to “microscope.” The mic has made everything loud, the world's not allowed to be quiet anymore. Maybe we should call them “macrophones” since telephone's already taken... CD: Well, a microscope is a lens. What got me interested in sound was that a microphone acts like a lens. There are wide angle lenses, or a lens that gets your eye up close to something far away, or at a tiny level. The same is true of the microphone. You can use a parabolic mic to hear what the coach is saying on a sports field or a mic that picks­up the sound from the entire cathedral. There's this whole gamut... I'm kind of playing with the words here. I'm into the minuteness of the sound, but I'm interested in the minuteness of the mark itself. PB: I guess it's a Deluezean, generative, statement, then? It's not a metaphor, it's an actual thing with which we can work. CD : That's right. PB: While doing some background work on you I found myself at interesting places on the internet. For example, Konstantin Raudive and a brief jog into Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP); perhaps this was just synchronicity. But, it's a happy coincidence nonetheless because the them of this issue of continent. is “the moraine” and one of the nuances of this term is “what remains.” Is there a metaphysical or epistemological problem that you're sorting­out here? CD: Think about fossils: fossils are the first recording device, you know? It's the first, natural, recording device. It's in this way that I think my works are fossilized time. Artifacts of that process. Van Gogh is a strong source for me in this regard: it's not what he's painting it's how. You're seeing his nervous system at work. The what is so incidental, the chairs, the flowers, etc. It's funny: when I first started doing this, before I started drawing voices, I was doing these things in cemeteries. I was doing automatic drawings. And when I took this experiment to its maximum I was taking hydrophones and burying them in abandoned graves. I was thinking about the mic rig as the south coordinate and I'd use a shortwave radio as the north coordinate. Usually it was just white noise, but on the east and west I'd station a writer and a drawer. So I'd have these things going on simultaneously and I'd be mixing them at the same time. PB: How'd it come out? CD: Well, just like you'd expect. It was a lot of white noise. But I think that Raudive was on to something. Burroughs used to say something similar when he'd talk about being in a foreign country where he didn't know the language and then he'd start to hear things. At the base, what I'm doing is pattern recognition. I do have a writing component to the drawings. I haven't exploited it in a while but... I use a vocoder, which was developed to encrypt spy signals during one of the World Wars. The mechanism takes two channels, one being the spy's signal combined with noise and then the other channel is a sine wave so that the intended recipient can pick out the words. So I did something like this with Beowulf. I tried combining the spoken word with other television and radio sources, but that didn't work because a book on tape is usually read in a very steady clip and the result was too garbled. So the second try, instead of drawing I was writing, trying to articulate the sounds that I could hear in this garbled transmission of Beowulf. You start to think you hear something, so you start to write what you think you're hearing. But what you're hearing is just being triggered by this articulating action. When the sound of the drawing lines up with the sound of the word you get something. But it's not ever what you're really hearing. You start writing and you're trying to keep up with what you think you're hearing and it is truly, in the most true sense of the phrase, automatic writing. You can contrive and go into a “spirit trance” or whatever, but... PB: It's uninteresting to you? CD: Well, it's unbelievable. It's just listening to sounds and following along. The magic is out there, there are no tricks or anything. You do this exercise with twenty people and you will get twenty totally different writings. But, you're creating the sound and you're creating the writing as an interpretation. That's the thing with EVP, it's homophonic translation. PB: Do you trust a straight line? I know you start with these meticulous lines at the beginning of the drawings but they do change over time. CD: I'm trying to show that there are these imperfections in structures and that over the reiterations of these structures these imperfections become amplified. But you can see them in tree formation as well. The rings alter their shape as the trees grow. PB: Is that your transmission then? You're not just receiving these sounds but you're broadcasting this message as well? CD: Things exist because of their opposites. These drawings are really about nothing. It's the first body of work I've had where people project so much of stuff onto the works. So there you go, things existing because of their opposites. It's kind of like with Mike Kelley: the work was about a critique of commodity culture and commodifying emotions. Using toys this was a critique of production. But then suddenly people were saying it was about abuse and the abuse that Mike Kelley had suffered. And it wasn't but he heard that and said, “I'll go with it,” and so he did. I think that's the nature of communication: I send this but you receive that instead and this makes me think about what I sent in a different way. (shrink)

"Mathématicien et philosophe, Jean Cavaillès (1903-1944) a compris en toute clarté que la philosophie n'est ni maîtresse ni servante des mathématiques et des sciences, mais qu'elle peut être leur amie. Elle n'a pas à s'arroger la fonction magistrale de vérifier à leur place la solidité de leurs fondements ni à contrôler ou exploiter leurs résultats pour la plus grande gloire de Dieu ou de la Cause. Elle n'a pas non plus à s'asservir aux mathématiques ou aux sciences comme sources uniques (...) de vérité, justice ou justesse. Une philosophie amie des sciences entretient avec elles un dialogue à bénéfice mutuel : elle s'instruit auprès d'elles et peut, en retour, procurer aux mathématiciens et scientifiques une conscience plus claire de leur propre pratique, s'ouvrant avec eux à l'histoire de cette pratique. Observer la pensée scientifique, dans son travail, ses difficultés et ses succès, et l'aider à s'observer elle-même : tâche aussi libératrice que difficile qui vise l'impérissable idéal aristotélicien de la pensée de la pensée. Voilà la haute et rayonnante ambition de Cavaillès. C'est cet héritage que les cinq auteurs de ce livre ont voulu transmettre et commencer à faire fructifier. Et il fallait pour cela : libérer Cavaillès des interprétations unilatérales, souvent enjeux de pouvoir universitaire, telle celle qui en fait le héraut d'une "science sans cogito" ; retrouver la pluralité de ses inspirations philosophiques. Refusant aussi bien filiation que rupture définitive, il a une lecture critique-productive de Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Brunschvicg... Spinoza, explicitement évoqué par lui à propos de son engagement dans la Résistance, est une de ses références possibles quand il traite de l'auto-développement des mathématiques ; respecter la diversité de ses centres d'intérêt mathématiques. Il s'intéresse, on le sait, à l'axiomatisation et à la formalisation de la théorie des ensembles, mais tout autant ou plus à son surgissement chez Dedekind et Cantor, à la construction des ensembles finis à partir des ensembles infinis, à l'hypothèse du continu, etc. mettre ses catégories emblématiques (paradigme et thématisation) à l'épreuve d'autres moments essentiels de l'histoire des mathématiques que celui de l'essor de la théorie des ensembles ; pratiquer un dialogue amical entre mathématiciens et philosophes dans des études d'"épistémographie" entrelaçant histoire fine et philosophie. Aux lecteurs de juger si l'héritage est entre de bonnes mains."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In this final lecture, I used instructions coming from the outside as well as rhetorical philosophy up to the achievements of the United States in the way, cited the following as high as 20 U.S. I think that the achievements in philosophy, this 20 achievements are as follows: 1. Re- definition of hermeneutics, resulting in a "philosophical hermeneutics" . understand the concern of the moment rather than the ability to explain the object. 3 allows us to explain thus an awareness (...) event. 4 to become a historical understanding of events . 5 from the hermeneutic methodology In order to understand the events into ontology. 6 to understand a sight change and self-understanding of the event. 7 principles of change as history, literature and art. 8 offers a new aesthetic and poetics. 9 provides a way to deal with representational and abstract art of art. 10 and then regardless of the art real management problem. 11 reaffirmed the non-scientific literature and hermeneutics in true sense. 12 In order to read the classical works of the original to provide a new treatment. 13 new associate with the traditional relationship. 14 the art of interpretation be linked to a reading process. 15 In order to have affected the critical nursing science, history, sociology, etc. methods. 16 criticism of the limitations of the natural scientific thinking. 17 critique of modernity . 18 provides a large amount of pull on the Park map , Hegel and Heidegger books. 19 He described the dialogue by way of consultations In order to understand the contribution. 20. Tree up hermeneutics of tradition and openness to other cultures of the ancient model. With this eight p.m. description of achievements, but also showing a structure of these nine days the future of speech. In this final lecture I take an approach from the outside and ask what Gadamer has achieved in philosophy, then list twenty of what I see as his philosophical accomplishments. These achievements are as follows: 1. Redefines hermeneutics, creating a "philosophical hermeneutics." 2. Focuses on the moment of uptake instead of the object of interpretation. 3. Makes us aware of interpretation as an event. 4. Makes the event of understanding an historical event. 5. Changes hermeneutics from a methodology to an ontology of the event of understanding. 6. Makes understanding an event of transformation of horizon and self-understanding. 7. Transforms history, literature and art as disciplines. 8. Offers a new aesthetics and a new poetics. 9. Offers a view of art that is able to deal with representation and nonrepresentational art. 10. Reintroduces the question of truth in art. 11. Revalidates literature and humanities as true in a nonscientific sense. 12. Offers a new rationale for reading the classics. 13. Forges a new relationship to tradition . 14. Relates interpretation of art to the reading process. 15. Offers a critique of method that has influenced nursing, history, sociology, etc. 16. Offers a critique of the limits of scientific thinking. 17. Offers a critique of modernity. 18. Offers major books on Plato, Hegel, and Heidegger. 19. In describing dialogue in understanding, he contributes to understanding negotiation. 20. Sets an example of hermeneutical openness to tradition, antiquity, and other cultures. The framework of these lectures during these nine day is presented through accounting for the twenty achievements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Revisionism:The Bicentennial of Independence, the Early Republican Experience, and Intellectual History in Latin AmericaElías José PaltiLatin America's Revolution of Independence was an event of world-historical importance. Citizens of different regions simultaneously created new nation states and established republican systems of government. This occurred at a time when the very meaning of the notions of "nation" and "republic" remained ill-defined. In such a context, a number of debates naturally (...) emerged regarding the tenets of modern politics, and the kind of dilemmas and problems contained therein.Yet the assessment of the historical relevance of these disputes has been precluded by the teleological assumptions which have informed traditional approaches in the history of ideas. These assumptions have led historians to interpret these disputes as mere expressions of local prejudices that prevented the correct understanding of the true meaning of the modern liberal concept of representative democracy. According to this traditional view, the concerns of Latin American commentators were seen as "deviations" from the rational path of conceptual development and understanding. It was necessary to undermine this traditional teleological prejudice before the debates around these notions produced in Latin America in the nineteenth century could reveal their historical significance and become matters for systematic analysis. The rise of a "new intellectual history," insofar as it has [End Page 593] questioned the assumed rationality and logical consistency of the putative models and disclosed the contingent nature of their foundations, has opened the door to an entirely new universe of problems and issues for scholarly research in the field of Latin American politico-intellectual history.The great wave of new studies on the crisis of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the emergence of new national states, triggered by the approach of the Bicentennial of Independence, has been greatly influenced by this new set of questions.1 Historians from different countries in Latin America have revisited that fundamental event, and have sought to revise established perspectives in the field. This has made room for the development of a self-defined "revisionist" position. However, what is to be revised has not always been clear.The revisionists seek to dislocate an epic narrative of independence as the epiphany of long-lasting struggles of oppressed nations to recover their rights to self-determination.2 They argue that the teleological, nationalistic biases of traditional approaches led their authors to see as already present at the point of departure an entity (the nation) which actually could be perceived only at the point of arrival. If understood in this way, however, the revisionists' contributions are hardly innovative. In the decade of the 1960s, a series of studies, propelled by the spread in Latin America of Marxist thought and social history, as well as by the increasing presence of American and European historians in the field, had already destabilized Manichean emplotments of the Revolution of Independence as a struggle between liberty and oppression.3 These studies introduced a number of nuances that questioned the objective basis of the states that emerged from the rupture of colonial ties. Instead, they demonstrated that the new states were the result of the contingent process of formation rather than its premise. [End Page 594] Yet it is not here that the profound transformation of the discipline has occurred. Revisionists do concentrate their criticism on the contents of nationalistic narratives, but leave untouched the theoretical premises on which these narratives rest. They fail to penetrate and undermine the sets of antinomies on which those teleological perspectives are grounded: enlightenment / romanticism; rationalism / nationalism; "liberty of the Modern" / "liberty of Ancient;" modernity / tradition; individualism / organicism, etc. In the following pages I will trace the origins of revisionism in Latin American, its contributions to the field of politico-intellectual history, and the kind of problems that it raises in turn.The Tradition of History of "Ideas" in Latin AmericaMany scholars consider Charles Hale to be the key figure in the emergence of the revisionist critique. As Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo remarks, for the case of Mexico (which has served as the exemplary case for the entire region): "Up to the moment Charles Hale came to intervene, we could recount to ourselves a delicious... (shrink)

En esta réplica se analizan las ideas de Manuel Atienza sobre cómo evaluar la argumentación judicial. La crítica se enfoca en la afirmación de que, en cada ámbito del Derecho (legislativo, judicial, abogacía, etc.), los criterios de corrección son diferentes. Se sostiene, en cambio, que los criterios que sirven para el ámbito judicial son iguales a los criterios que rigen los argumentos de los abogados. Si bien los argumentos de los abogados buscan la persuasión, su éxito requiere que se cumplan (...) los estándares usados por los jueces al evaluarlos. Donde sí cabe la distinción es respecto de la argumentación del legislador, pues en ese ámbito sus argumentos no dependen de las opiniones de los jueces al ser los propios legisladores autoridad en materia de interpretación de leyes. In this paper the author examines Manuel Atienza's ideas on how to evaluate judicial argumentation. One of the highlights of his work is the assertion that in every area of the law the marking criteria are different. The critique of this paper focuses on denying that the criteria used for the judiciary are different from the criteria governing lawyers' arguments. While the arguments of lawyers seek persuasion to succeed, they need to fulfill the standards used by judges to evaluate them. The distinction apparently does hold in relation to the legislative's argumentation because in this area arguments do not depend on the views or criteria of the judges insofar as the legislator himself is an authority, in his own sphere, in matters of interpretation of laws and the constitution. (shrink)

Pour la sémantique moderne, le sens d'un texte n'est plus seulement accessible à l'intuition : il peut se décrire rationnellement. L'analyse reconnaît d'abord dans chaque mot des composants élémentaires propres à la langue, que le contexte et la situation de communication convoquent ou virtualisent. Paradoxalement, cette microsémantique permet aussi de fonder la sémantique textuelle. Si bien qu'en deçà comme au-delà de la prétendue limite de la phrase se met à l'œuvre une théorie descriptive unifiée. De manière cohérente, elle permet de (...) rendre compte de questions éparses léguées par les traditions de la logique, de la rhétorique, de l'exégèse ou de la critique littéraire : métaphore, double sens, hypallage, tautologie, contradiction, thème et topos, etc. Toutefois le sens du texte n'est pas donné, mais construit par des stratégies de lecture. Aussi cette recherche s'ouvre-t-elle sur une théorie de l'interprétation, qui va de l'assignation du sens lexical à la construction des grandes unités textuelles. Elle ne cherche pas à énoncer le sens, mais à évaluer la plausibilité de divers parcours interprétatifs. Ce traité propose aussi des outils descriptifs aux linguistes, spécialistes de la littérature, historiens, psychologues, enseignants, bref à tous ceux qui ont affaire au texte, cette dimension majeure des langues. (shrink)

Une épistémologie phénoménologique est nécessairement intéressée aux points de contact et de passage entre problèmes scientifiques et problèmes philosophiques. Il est instructif, dans cette perspective, de revenir sur un moment historiquement décisif, mais éminemment équivoque, encore porteur de prolongements et de retournements dont nous n’avons peut-être pas encore pris toute la mesure : l’énoncé du principe de Pauli. Le statut logique de cet énoncé est lui-même ambigu : règle technique, semi-empirique, postulat, principe ou théorème, etc. Pour le meilleur et le (...) pire, ce principe se trouve accouplé dès l’origine au problème de l’individuation en physique. Nous proposons de revenir sur quelques traits philosophiquement saillants des interprétations que Weyl et de Broglie proposent dudit « principe d’exclusion Pauli » (ou PEP). L’un et l’autre y voient l’occasion d’un approfondissement du principe d’individuation prévalant jusqu’alors dans la physique classique : l’espace. Weyl associe le PEP au principe leibnizien des indiscernables et tente de modéliser l’espace en jeu au moyen de la théorie des groupes. Les changements de position de Pauli lui-même à ce propos ne sont pas moins instructifs. La position de De Broglie sur ce principe est un marqueur de sa trajectoire : de la théorie audacieuse, et, équivoque, de « l’onde-pilote », jusqu’à celle dite de la « double solution », en passant par la période de rétractation consécutive au congrès de Solvay de 1927. Ce qui persiste d’un bout à l’autre, c’est un partage entre espace « réel » empirique et espace de configuration mathématique imaginaire. Chez l’un et l’autre, cette interprétation est ainsi indissociable d’un nouveau partage du subjectif et de l’objectif et d’une réflexion critique sur le principe traditionnel d’individuation qu’est l’espace (ou le temps physique) au profit d’une articulation toujours plus subtile et complexe entre l’espace de la phénoménalisation (de l’observation) et les « espaces » de la modélisation mathématique, en particulier les espaces des états possibles décrits dans le formalisme de la statistique quantique. (shrink)

Books have their origins in conversations and seek to extend and expand those conversations over time and with different audiences. The conversations that have culminated in this book were initially stimulated through a research project at The Hastings Center on the role of religious voices in the professional fields of bioethical inquiry. Those professional conversations have continued throughout my academic career as a member of various institutional ethics committees, organizational ethics task forces, and in local, state, and national public policy (...) settings. The professional context of bioethics conversations can sometimes miss the richness of conversations that occur in the classroom and with various communities, including family members, friends, and religious and civic communities. These conversations provide an experiential depth, a groundedness in the lives and stories of persons, which augments and corrects the professionalized perspectives. I have been particularly fortunate and appreciative of opportunities to bridge the academic and professional with the personalized and communal through conversations about the ethical commitments and moral culture cultivated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon). I was invited to develop an overview essay on "Bioethics in Mormonism" for the professional reference work, Encyclopedia of Bioethics (3rd ed., 2004), and some years later received my first invitation to make a presentation on "LDS Ethics" in an academic setting at the University of Virginia. This book is the outgrowth of these many conversations and seeks to advance my communal bridging. My aim in this book is to begin bridging these various intersections between the LDS religious community and its moral culture, the professional fields of bioethics, and practical decision-making. This work seeks to be a catalyst for expanding discourse within the interdisciplinary field of Mormon studies to include ethics and bioethics. Ethics has not been a well-developed area in Mormon studies, in contrast to studies in LDS history, theology, or literature. To remedy this oversight, I present a substantive interpretation of the sources, theological background, and moral principles of LDS ethics. The historical narratives and conceptual intertwining I offer of both bioethics and of LDS moral culture is intended to complement and expand the realm of Mormon studies. A further objective is to create opportunities for reciprocal dialogues between the bioethics community and LDS scholarship. This conversation has yet to occur within academic disciplines, professional communities, or in public policy deliberations. My exposition, analysis, and critiques will intertwine and contextualize LDS moral values and health care practices within the ethical inquiry undertaken in the broader professional scholarship of bioethics. My arguments will disclose some points of common ground as well as areas of divergence towards the end of establishing the LDS faith tradition as a community of moral discourse for the bioethics field and the healing professions (medicine, nursing, pharmacy, etc.) it informs. My claim is that given its emerging cultural prominence, LDS ethical scholarship should engage in bioethical literacy and bioethics should be LDS-literate. I am also engaged in an effort to initiate more reflective dialogues regarding LDS ethics and moral culture among LDS scholars, LDS health care professionals, and the interested general LDS reader. The focus of the book on the interrelationship of religion, ethics, medicine, and health care should present for these various audiences new opportunities for mindful reflection and creative scholarship on the ethical implications of faith commitments, the responsibilities of the healing professions, and religious dimensions of public policy and public bioethics. A religious community that is formed through narratives and practices of covenantal commitments of love of neighbor needs to have a robust discourse about its ethical character. I have understood my scholarship in biomedical ethics and in religious ethics through a linking metaphor of my moral culture, of medicine, and the law, of bearing witness. The witness offers moral realities, moral truths about the way things are, vocalizes and embodies moral experience, and prophetically critiques the hypocrisies of the powerful and their oppression of the vulnerable by offering a new story, a re-storying, of tradition and conventional practice. (shrink)

The collection of Edmund Husserl's sketches on time-consciousness from the years 1893-1917, edited by Rudolf Boehm and published as Volume X in the Husserliana series, affords significant new material for the study of the evolution of Husserl's thought. Specifically, the sketches suggest that in the course of analyzing the consciousness of temporal objects Husserl became convinced that a distinction must be drawn between an ultimate or absolute flow of consciousness and the immanent temporal objects or contents -- sense-data, appearances of (...) external things, acts of wishing, judging, etc. -- constituted or known within that flow. Further, the texts indicate that the emergence of the absolute dimension was connected with the development during this period of two distinct interpretations of the constitution of time-consciousness. Husserl apparently worked out the first of these during the years 1901-1907, and only towards the end of this period did the notion of an absolute consciousness, absent in earlier texts, make its appearance. And no sooner did it emerge than Husserl undertook a critique of his first interpretation which ultimately culminated in its rejection. In the new position which then appeared, around 1909, the absolute flow of time-constituting consciousness, and its distinction from temporal objects both immanent and transcendent, was unequivocally affirmed. We propose now to discuss this evolution and the emergence and nature of the absolute flow of consciousness. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche and the Political by Daniel W. ConwayDaniel BreazealeDaniel W. Conway. Nietzsche and the Political. London: Routledge, 1997. Pp. xii + 163. Cloth, $65. Paper, $16.95.This brief but stimulating work is a vigorous effort to defend the importance of Nietzsche as a “political” thinker. In order to make this case, Conway has to fight on two fronts: simultaneously rebutting the views of the many contemporary interpreters who argue (...) that Nietzsche is either an anti-political philosopher or else a distinctively inferior political thinker, while also reclaiming Nietzsche’s political thought from the race-theorists and Nazis who so successfully appropriated it earlier in this century. Conway is victorious on both fronts, and makes a compelling case for the contemporary relevance of Nietzsche’s thoughts on the broad topics of “culture” and “education.” This, of course, by no means exhausts the realm of the “political,” and Conway has little or nothing to say about Nietzsche’s views on such topics as the state, justice, legality, etc. Instead, he is concerned with what Nietzsche himself called “great politics.” For this reason, the book is concerned almost exclusively with Nietzsche’s later writings, focusing primarily upon the writings of 1886–88, while generally ignoring the Nachlass altogether.Chapter 1 (“Political Perfectionism”) deals with Nietzsche’s conception of the fundamental task of politics: namely, to facilitate humankind’s endless quest for “perfection,” a quest that alone justifies human existence. Since Nietzsche associated the perfection of the species with the appearance of the rarest and most exotic individual specimens, it follows that the specific task of political activity is “to legislate the conditions under which such exemplars will most likely emerge.” It is within the context of this “political” ideal that Conway offers his own, ingenious and controversial interpretation of Zarathustra’s teaching concerning the Übermensch.The relationship between Nietzsche’s perfectionism and his moral pluralism is the subject of Chapter 2 (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of Morality for Life”). Here Conway offers a thoughtful comparison between Nietzsche himself and some of his “models,” such as Caesar, Napoleon, and the Laws of Manu, and takes advantage of this comparison in order to introduce Nietzsche’s crucial—albeit extremely problematic—notions of the “order of rank” and “pathos of distance.” Chapter 3 (“Perfectionism in the [End Page 177] Twilight of the Idols”) is devoted to Nietzsche’s “critique of modernity.” Here Conway offers his own “political” interpretation of Nietzsche’s withdrawal from the “political macrosphere” of his own age and retreat into the “political microsphere” of his personal life and literary/cultural projects, including his various “educational” schemes. A certain ambiguity in the overall conception of this book becomes apparent at this point, however, inasmuch as Conway finds himself simultaneously distinguishing between Nietzsche’s “moral” and “political” perfectionism, while continuing to insist upon the larger “political” significance of the former—even while conceding that, for Nietzsche himself, political perfection was a mere means for moral perfection. Chapter 4 (“Regimens of Self-Overcoming”) contains a detailed account of the necessary antagonism between the (“untimely”) Nietzschean philosopher and his own age and an insightful discussion of what Conway calls “the aversive mechanism of self-overcoming” (69). Conway’s discussion of the link between Nietzschean perfectionism and the adoption of multiple perspectives (“experimentalism”) is one the clearest and best in the literature. Nietzsche’s own self-experiments and his understanding of the same as “signs” for others are discussed in Chapter 5 (“The Philosopher’s Versucherkunst”). Like other recent interpreters, Conway calls attention to the essential role of erotic love in Nietzsche’s conception of the process of experimental self-education and to the way in which eros links purely individual goals to larger cultural and educational ones. The chapter concludes with an admirable account of how Nietzsche was able to harness and to employ his own resentment as an instrument of self-overcoming. This theme is continued in Chapter 6 (“Comedians of the Ascetic Ideal”), which tries to show how Nietzsche sought to safeguard the crippled will in an unpropitious era, not by rejecting the ascetic ideal, but by employing it in a new way. This is perhaps Conway’s most original... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:George M. Wilson EDWARD SAID ON CONTRAPUNTAL READING Edward Said's rich and powerful new book, Culture and Imperialism,1 offers, as one strand of its multifaceted discussion, methodological reflections on the reading and interpretation of works of narrative fiction. More specifically, Said delineates and defends what he calls a "contrapuntal" reading (or analysis) ofthe texts in question. I am sympathetic to much ofwhat Said aims to accomplish in tiiis endeavor, (...) but I am also puzzled about some key aspects of his proposal. I will begin by presenting a brief sketch of my understanding of what a contrapuntal reading involves, and I will tiien explain some of the doubts and puzzlement I feel. Unfortunately, there is much that Said says about even diis limited topic that I will have to by-pass, but I hope to say enough to initiate some helpful discussion of the issues. I should note that aldiough the topic of "contrapuntal reading" recurs with significant emphasis throughout his book, Said's direct explication of the enterprise is scattered across several chapters, and the relevant remarks tend to be, in each instance, fairly brief. Given this state of affairs, I have tried to extract a reasonably unified account from a wide range of passages, and I hope to have done so as sympadietically and accurately as possible. Nevertheless, die fact remains that what follows is my reconstruction of the view diat Said adumbrates. Contrapuntal readings are meant to interweave, mutually qualify, and above all, superimpose die legitimate claims ofinternal or intrinsic readings of a work, on the one hand, and the claims ofvarious forms of external critique, on the odier. Such readings rest upon the fact that any literary fiction refers to or depicts a complex of materials that have been drawn from the actual world, e.g., actual people, places, institutions, and practices. These items are taken up and variously deployed Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 265-273 266Philosophy and Literature within the wider imaginative project of the work. It is crucial to this deployment tiiat the intended audience can be expected to bring to the text a set of background "attitudes" concerning die relevant real world materials, and tiiat diese beliefs, concerns, ideological presuppositions, etc., are elaborated widiin die work's embedded patterns. Thus, die text is anchored in what Said calls "a structure of reference and attitude," and diis structure constitutes die base from which a contrapuntal reading chiefly proceeds. Reading contrapuntally, interpreters move back and forth between an internal and external standpoint on the work's imaginative project, with special attention to the structure of reference and attitudes it contains. From an internal standpoint, interpretation aims at explanation of the work's narrational, rhetorical, and linguistic strategies, an explanation that respects the strategies and die density of the textual elements tiiey implicate. It is important that the internal standpoint articulate die work's vision as compellingly as possible, not only because diis has an obvious interest of its own, but because the persuasiveness ofcommentary from an external standpoint depends upon giving full credit to the sophistication of the text. (We will return to diis point shortly.) An external standpoint examines the problematic seductiveness of die work's capacity to guide its audience's responses and seeks to define die limited degrees of freedom widiin whatever complexity it establishes. By reminding us of information about the structure of reference that die work ignores, distorts, or minimizes and by reminding us that the structure of invoked attitudes has plausible alternatives that the work has effectively excluded, die external standpoint situates the text critically within a wider field of imaginative possibilities. As Said formulates the point, we read from an external perspective "... with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented" in die work" (CUfI, p. 66). In elaborating the account above, I have spoken of "intrinsic readings " of narrative fictions, and it will help to fill in my sketch if I specify the fairly standard conception I have in mind. Said does not address diis as a separate topic, but I believe that die following remarks are fully compatible with what he seems... (shrink)